Mark Twain's Hannibal Huck Tom Author:Walter Blair Editor Although Mark Twain's admiration for Huckleberry Finn occasionally wavered, his fascination with what is often called the Matter of Hannibal, from which the book grew, was constant. ...Many stories developed from the author's early life in the Mississippi River town. Despite wide interest in this material, a number of pieces about Hannibal, fact... more »ual as well as fictional, have been available only to scholars because they have never before been published.
...Mr. Blair (editor) has now focused his editorial and critical skills on the relevant unpublished documents, providing authoritative texts and the full history of places and characters most important to Mark Twain's creative life.
The characters are often similar and hte river town retains its color and its nostalgic appeal. But new, and often surprising, dimensions are added to he persons and places by the author's factual accounts of the prototypes for fiction. "Villagers of 1840-3" and "Jane Lampton Clemens" provide unique insights concerning Hannibal and its literary re-creation.
Fictional pieces range in length from a four-page manuscript fragment to a complete dramatization of Tom Sawyer and such sustained but incomplete narratives as "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among Indians" and "Tome Sawyer's Conspiracy," Although none of the pieces is sturdy enough to survive on its own, their collection gives a full and revealing view of Mark Twain's obsessive attempts to revive in literary form the Matter of Hannibal.« less